K.C. Shaw's Blog

Look at that! I have a new book out! Double Dragon Books had originally scheduled Evil Outfitters, Ltd for release at the end of the year. Then it got moved up to July. Then a slot opened up in the publishing schedule, and it's out now!

It's set in the same world as Jack of All Trades, if you liked that one. It'll probably take a few days to appear on Amazon, but you can order the book from the publisher at the link above. There's also an excerpt of the first chapter on that page.

I don't have anything much to say except I'm sick of looking at that photo of my catfish dinner from the other week. I've discovered that the picture is only interesting if I'm hungry. Otherwise it's disgusting. So I'm going to scroll it down a little by posting.

I brought my writing files up to date this evening. I have a plastic box with hanging file folders inside where I keep copies of contracts and so forth. It's useful to have it all in one place in case I need to check something. And as it happens, I discovered I have my rights back to a few older pieces. Now I need to find time to dig up reprint markets.

Tomorrow I have to go in to work at 8am and I probably won't get home until after 10pm. This is really, really unusual, fortunately, and with luck it's the last day like this I'll have to endure. I'm actually filling in tomorrow evening for someone who's on family leave. It's a secondary contract to my main job, so I get a separate little paycheck and everything. It won't be much money, but every little bit helps. But oh, do I dread tomorrow night.

Oh, and I've signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo for June! It's like regular NaNo but you pick a month in the summer to do it! I wasn't going to bother, but I want to work on my new YA project (working title: Shadow Trail) and this will be a good way to get a lot of words down quickly. I have an outline already, so it should go pretty smoothly. (Famous last words, of course. I just jinxed myself.)

My success so far this year finishing up both Bloodhound and The Cabin on Wildwood Hill has made me eager to finish more projects. I certainly have enough active files in my WIP folder. I've been working on Adventures in Zoology, which is more than half done already, but my recent work editing and finally proofing The Weredeer (for release in early summer!) has made me interested in one of its unfinished sequels, Stag in Ruin.

I have started a new, untitled YA and I think it's going to be pretty good. I'm not hurrying with it, though. This time of year I rarely plunge into a new project. It's more time to peck around and finish up old ones. And that's fine with me.

I had some pictures on my camera that I just processed. They have nothing to do with anything. The first is my supper last night, which was catfish. Very good catfish! I picked it up at our little local store because I suspected it was probably locally caught, and I think I was right. It was certainly very fresh fish. I couldn't eat it all, but I sure tried.

 
My recipe for pan-fried catfish: Mix about 1/2 cup cornmeal with 1 tsp cayenne pepper and 1 tsp paprika, some fresh-ground pepper, and a little bit of salt in a big, fairly shallow bowl or pan. Pour maybe 1/4 c olive oil into a frying pan and heat. Mince two cloves of garlic and put into the oil. Rinse catfish fillets, shake off most of the water, and press into the cornmeal mixture until each fillet is covered on both sides. Place fillets into frying pan on top of garlic. Cook six or seven minutes on each side until flaky and cooked through, and salt a little bit whenever you flip the fillets. Squirt lots of fresh lemon over the fillets just before eating. Yum.

The next picture is Jekyll sitting on the pergola, taunting me. I did finally figure out he can get down by himself. He drives me crazy sometimes.


And finally, I found these little copper thingies on etsy and bought them--they were only a few bucks in all, including shipping. I don't know what to do with them but I love looking at them. They are so little and perfect.

The spring semester is over at last. Finals week has been punishing as usual. Back when I was in college, I never dreamed that one day I'd be on the other side of the tests (for those of you playing along at home, I am a test proctor/invigilator in my day job) and that it would be worse than taking the tests myself.

I've worked here four years now, so I know not to ask too much of myself during finals week. I can be productive next week, not now. Fortunately, the only thing I have due at the moment are the proofs for The Weredeer (yes, we're close!). Unfortunately, I have enmeshed myself in an online game.

It's called Ultima Online. I quit playing maybe five years ago and honestly thought the game had closed down. Through really byzantine means--by which I mean that I didn't actually seek it out--I found out a few days ago that the game is still going. So I opened up my old account for the heck of it, and lo and behold all my characters are still there and so are their skills and all their stuff.

This game was a pure time sink for me for years. I can see that it won't be that way for me soon; I figure after a few weeks max, I'll be getting bored with it again, and I'm already finding myself shutting down after a while and doing something else. But I have also spent many hours over the last two days just wasting time in the game. You know what's a time-waster and boring? Fishing in an online game. And yet I spent two-plus hours last night doing just that.

That's fine for finals week. But not next week, when I don't have an excuse to waste time.

Jekyll the cat decided to keep me busy today by puking all over the guest bed. When I stripped the quilt and blanket off, I discovered the sheets on it were still flannel. While I washed the bedding, I put fresh cotton sheets on the bed (I make that bed because it looks funny with just a quilt, and I'm in that room all the time since the computer's in there).

Then I looked in the mirror and discovered that my conjunctivitis was much worse. My right eye looked horrible! Rather than wait a day to call the doctor and get an appointment for later in the week, I decided I'd better go to a walk-in clinic that was open on Sunday. I found one in West Knoxville and waited an hour (reading, of course) to see a doctor for about three minutes. The doctor didn't say much; in fact, I got the distinct impression that if it were up to him, he'd be in bed sleeping off his hangover. He looked in my eyes, listened (presumably) to my nervous babbling about symptoms, and prescribed me antibiotic eyedrops.

When I got home, I thought I might as well wash the sheets on my bed. So I did. I did three loads of laundry today and feel like I've been making beds constantly. Tip taught me by my grandmother: put the top sheet on upside-down; that way when you turn the bed down, the sheet pattern shows.

So I have a clean bed to look forward to tonight, and I don't have to worry about whether I should see a doctor about my eye, and I know--because they weighed me at the doctor's--that my home scale is accurate. Unfortunately.

Also, I had to clean all the stuff off the bed, which I needed to do anyway. Jekyll is pleased with his clean new bed.

[This was supposed to be posted last night, but my internet connection died right before I hit 'publish.' So I went to bed instead.]

I think I have pinkeye, more properly called conjunctivitis. Sunday morning I woke up with my right eye gummy and bloodshot, and all day long it burned and wept. Monday it wasn't any better, so I bought some Visine eyedrops, which helped. I figured I'd give it a few days and if it didn't get any better, I'd go to the doctor. Then I remembered that I have access to The Internet!, so I looked up pinkeye and discovered that yes, that's probably what I've got, and that it has two basic causes. The more common cause is a virus, and there's basically no treatment except time; it's very contagious and people with viral pinkeye shouldn't go to work or school. The other cause is bacterial, which can be treated with antibiotics; that type is also very contagious although once treatment starts, people with it can safely go to work or school a day later.

I went to work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and today I ran errands and bought books. I feel like typhoid Mary. Anyway, my eye feels much better today--I haven't even needed to use the Visine. That matches up with what I learned online too. Whatever the cause, pinkeye usually clears up even without treatment within a week to ten days.

I bought books today because my to-be-read shelves are getting really thin. I'm burning up the reading lately; I think the last time I was reading so much was in ninth grade, when we had half an hour free reading time a day at school which I augmented by reading during all my classes. I burned through the library. These days I buy most of my books, doing my part to keep the publishing industry going.

Of course, part of the reason my TBR shelves are thinned out is because I have actually thinned them. I do this periodically, going through and reading the first few pages or chapters of books that have been there a long time, and pulling the ones I don't like. I didn't count how many books I culled and took to the used book store today, but it was probably 15. I brought home 10, most of them bought used. And then I read one.

Despite all the reading, I've found some time to write. I've finished Bloodhound at long last, and--quite to my surprise--finished my aborted NaNoWriMo attempt from last year, the little kid's book with talking animals. It turned out just 20,000 words and I think it's pretty good. It has no market, of course, but I'm just glad I've finished one of the books in my WIP file.

I was going to talk about my day yesterday, which involved a five-mile hike, the planting of many flowers and tomatoes, the scattering of my mother's ashes, and my nearly fatal tumble down some steps (okay, not nearly fatal; I just skinned one knee slightly and bruised my lip). But then Blogger pulled the thing where I have to upgrade to their NEW AND IMPROVED YEAH RIGHT interface.

Why? Why why why? Gmail just got a new interface too, and I hate it for the same reasons I hate the new Blogger one: I can't read it properly. My work computer (not that I ever, ever use my work computer for anything but work; this is merely hypothetical) is very old and can't display the new interfaces correctly. On my home computer, the fields in the new interfaces are so washed out I have trouble even seeing them, much less reading them. On my laptop, the new interfaces are too spread out for me to read comfortably on the small screen.

In other words, it's BROKEN when the old versions weren't broken at all. I am now directing waves of hate at Google, who of course runs Gmail and Blogger and obviously doesn't have enough to do.

For those of you who are interested in seeing lots of pretty pictures of my hike, I've started a new blog just for my hiking stuff called Hiking Hot.

My to-do list today was long and grim. It started out TAXES and ended funeral home, where I collected Mom's ashes. If you opt not to get a swanky, expensive urn, they give you ashes in a cardboard box with a label gummed to the lid. The box is surprisingly heavy--or surprisingly light, whichever way you want to look at it.

In addition to TAXES and funeral home, neither of which were any fun (those were Mom's taxes, too; I did mine months ago), I called and canceled Mom's credit card, stopped by the utilities office to put the account in my name instead of hers, and got a cashier's check at the credit union to pay the funeral home. I also got my oil changed and bought a couple of books, which was less miserable. Still, not a good day today.

After all that, I felt I could safely pitch my diet out the window for tonight. I went out and bought a big slab of raspberry dark chocolate, and flowers for the dining room table. I've kept fresh flowers on that table since we moved in last fall, but I would have bought flowers tonight anyway. And since that cardboard box, which I've shoved onto the mantel for the time being, looks so bare and sad, I bought some white ribbon to tie around it. And I bought a pair of underwear because A) they had stars on them and I will buy anything with stars and/or daisies printed on it, and B) when I'm depressed I buy chocolate, and when I'm really depressed I buy linens (because nothing makes me feel better like a new nightgown and fresh new sheets; although I often buy nightclothes just for the hell of it, so anyone keeping track out there wouldn't necessarily be able to tell if I'm sad or just wanting a new set of pajamas). Anyway, when I checked out I realized with some embarrassment that with the flowers, chocolate, ribbon, and underwear, I looked like I was gearing up for a night. I wonder if the clerk is still wondering what I plan to do with the grapefruit juice I also bought.

There are still a few things on my list I didn't get to, but I figure I did pretty well today. These things have to be done. They're not pleasant, but they're all part and parcel of being connected with other people.

My Goodreads giveaway had 1,401 entries! My God! One of those people won, and I've shipped the book off to her. One thousand four hundred and one entries. Wow.

The cat is demolishing one of his jingle-balls (the one with the feather, I think) in the living room and I'm still up because I'm waiting for the dishwasher to finish so I can start the washing machine. Tomorrow is Easter. I think I'll walk down by the river and think about things.

I hope the weather is pleasant wherever you are. I hope everything is as good as can be expected. I hope you have a good book to read.